thoughts (and links) of a retired "social scientist" as he tries to make sense of the world.....

what you get here

This is not a blog which expresses instant opinions on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers as jumping-off points for some reflections about our social endeavours.

So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

View of another world

Although I blog frequently about Bulgaria and Romania
(between which countries I have been dividing my life in these last 5 years), I
should say more about the other countries in which I have spent significant
time – Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Kyrgzstan, for example. A New York Review of
Books blogpost and a review in The Nation of a forgotten Azeri satirical magazine of a century ago gives me an opportunity to rectify this oversight. To give an easy introduction
to the various actors, I borrow from the review in the Nation - adding in,
where appropriate, links one of which is to a recent book on the
magazine containing many of the caricatures with powerful line drawing and
colours.

The backstreets of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, have a
certain, winding magic. They house former caravanserai, once flophouses offered
to travellers throughout central Asia, that have today been polished up into
candlelit restaurants. Tall, grey blocks mingle with flourishes of Persian
architecture - a symbol of Baku's straddling geography between Russia and Iran.
But there are dozens of bookshops tucked away in these streets, shelves stacked
with first editions and Soviet periodicals from the city's communist era, which
ended in 1991.It was in one of these booksellers near Maiden Tower that
Slavs and Tatars, a collective of artists and writers, discovered a true bibliophile's dream:
editions of one of the region's most daring yet overlooked satirical
publications - Molla Nasreddin.
Stating their sphere of interest as everything east of the former Berlin Wall
and west of the Great Wall of China, Slavs and Tatars make this loosely defined
area of Eurasia their patch. Starting as a reading group that shared
translations of books from this region (what they call "an arcane version
of the Oprah Winfrey book club"), they've since exhibited sculptures and
installation work in museums internationally, and been part of group shows at
The Third Line gallery in Dubai.

"The illustrations drew us to Molla Nasreddin,"
says Slavs and Tatars. "They're reminiscent of Honore Daumier or Toulouse
Lautrec." Molla Nasreddin was founded in 1906 by editor-in-chief Jalil
Mammadguluzadeh and satirist-poet Mirza Sabir, both proud Azeris yet champions
of a "modern" and markedly western system of values. It espoused this
worldview via beautifully wrought yet withering cartoons and editorials that
remain biting today.Few were spared the editorial wrath: suffocating and
outmoded fanatics, meddling European and Russian imperial powers, the position
of women in society at that time and the hypocritical elite. Education,
equality and regional independence, through a lens of secularism, was Mammadguluzadeh
and Sabir's vision for central Asia's future. It was penned in Azeri Turkish in
three different scripts - Arabic, Cyrillic and Latin alphabets - showing the
three forms that the language went through as Azerbaijan passed into Soviet
hands. This made translation into English difficult when Slavs and Tatars set
out to publish a reader in 2011, titled "Molla Nasreddin: The Magazine That
Would've, Could've, Should've". Here's another good review which gives a sense of the treasures the book holds

The book features their selections from 3,000 illustrations,
curated into the different avenues of critique that the magazine took - such as
Education, Colonialism and Women.One illustration, for instance, shows two Azeri women
wrapped from head to toe in fabric, and pointing in envy at the barred windows
of a prison. The caption alongside reads: "Sister, look how lucky they
are: they have windows!"In another, five beaten-down Azeri men carry bespectacled
donkeys on their back; plumes of smoke rise from long cigarette holders in the
mouths of these remarkably aristocratic looking beasts.

Despite moving offices to and from Georgia and Iran,
intermittent bans, and 10 years of the Soviets increasingly shoving editorial
directives down the throats of the magazine's staff, Molla Nasreddin survived
until 1931. Simultaneously, a cloud of obscurity seemed to settle over a region
that, says Slavs and Tatars, had been one of the most intellectually and
politically important places in the past 2,000 years.

"If anybody even takes notice of this region, they
think of it as obscure, especially the more west you go - you talk to people
about Kyrgyzstan, and you might as well be talking about Star Wars," says
Slavs and Tatars. "But Baku was producing half of the world's oil until
the first half of the 20th century," noting as well that Azerbaijan was
one of the first countries in which women could vote (well before the UK), and
publications such as Molla Nasreddin demonstrate an intellectual, progressive
rigour from this part of the world that has been so far overlooked."That's why we're called Slavs and Tatars and not by
our real names: it's not the work of a group of artists but the work of a
region that has many nationalities, and had a shared heritage at some point.
"From the point of view of the West, with this nonsense that passes as
conventional wisdom that the West and Islam are on a collision course; you have
to look at a part of the world where they have long coexisted." Namely,
Eurasia.The collective say, however, that Molla Nasreddin is also
their antithesis in that it took modernity to mean westernisation. "We
don't believe that at all, in fact we believe in quite the opposite - more of
an indigenous or hybridised form of modernity." But they still acknowledge its historical
significance: "It's a shame that it came down to us as artists and writers
in the early 21st century to rediscover one of the most important publications
of the Muslim world," they continue. "That's testament to how
overlooked this part of the world is."Very few people would spend two years of their life
working on something they disagree with, but we are living in an increasingly
insular world intellectually - less and less are we embracing the things that
we disagree with."

I’ve been wanting for some time to do a post (if not a
booklet!) about beautiful publications - which bring together layout; font;
illustrations; paper quality; binding; and writing. It's a challenging
combination which some cookery books almost manage (with the exception of font
and writing)

About Me

Can be contacted at bakuron2003@yahoo.co.uk
Political refugee from Thatcher's Britain (or rather Scotland) who has been on the move since 1991. First in central Europe - then from 1999 Central Asia and Caucasus. Working on EU projects - related to building capacity of local and central government. Home base is an old house in the Carpathian mountains and Sofia

about the blog

Writing in my field is done by academics - and gives little help to individuals who are struggling to survive in or change public bureaucracies. Or else it is propoganda drafted by consultants and officials trying to talk up their reforms. And most of it covers work at a national level - whereas most of the worthwhile effort is at a more local level. The restless search for the new dishonours the work we have done in the past. As Zeldin once said - "To have a new vision of the future it is first necessary to have new vision of the past".I therefore started this blog to try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history - particularly in the endeavour of what used to be known as "social justice". My generation believed that political activity could improve things - that belief is now dead and that cynicism threatens civilisationI also read a lot and wanted to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time or inclination -as well as my love of painting, particularly the realist 20th century schools of Bulgaria and Belgium.A final motive for the blog is more complicated - and has to do with life and family. Why are we here? What have we done with our life? What is important to us? Not just professional knowledge - but what used to be known, rather sexistically, as "wine, women and song" - for me now in the autumn of my life as wine, books and art....

quotes

“I will act as if what I do makes a difference”
William James 1890.

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas"
JM Keynes (1935)

"We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes"
JR Saul (1992)

"There are four sorts of worthwhile learning - learning about · oneself
· learning about things
· learning how others see us
· learning how we see others"
E. Schumacher (author of "Small is Beautiful" (1973) and Guide for the Perplexed (1977))

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."
Bertrand Russell, 1950

Followers

der arme Dichter (Carl Spitzweg)

my alter ego

the other site

In 2008 I set up a website in the (vain) hope of developing a dialogue around issues of public administration reform - particularly in transition countries where I have been living and working for the past 26 years. The site is www.freewebs.com/publicadminreform and contains the major papers I have written over the years about my attempts to reform various public organisations in the various roles which I've had - politician; academic/trainer; consultant.